Convicted murderer gets life term for 2nd slaying

April 30, 2003|By Jeff Coen, Tribune staff reporter.

Twice-convicted murderer Ralph Andrews was sentenced to life in prison on Tuesday for the 1977 rape and evisceration slaying of a 16-year-old girl.

Cook County Circuit Judge Marjorie Laws told Andrews she saw not a glimmer of mitigation in his case, calling the slaying of Susan Clarke "vicious and despicable" and criticizing him for not showing remorse to Clarke's family when given a chance Tuesday. But Laws decided against making Andrews the first person in Cook County to be sentenced to death since Illinois' Death Row was emptied earlier this year.

"The demons that took hold of your brain when you committed the most terrible crime on this Earth, murder, those same demons must be picking with your brain and your mind at this time," the judge said.

Andrews, 59, formerly of Rogers Park, already is serving a life sentence for the 1991 murder of Virginia Griffin, 44, who also was raped and cut open and left in a secluded area on the North Side. He entered a blind guilty plea in the Clarke case earlier this year, meaning he didn't know what his sentence could be when he agreed to the plea.

He also has been linked to other slayings, including the 1972 evisceration slaying of a 15-year-old girl.

The life sentence was handed down after Clarke's mother, Constance Clarke, read an emotional victim-impact statement for the court, describing years of missing her only daughter. The girl, who wanted to become a nurse, was full of life and was becoming independent, Clarke said.

"Her father and I have been robbed and cheated...out of the joys that only a daughter can provide," she said. "Her absence colors our holidays.

"I will never see her beaming face as her father walks her down the aisle."

Clarke told the court how she remembered buying her daughter a new brown suit to wear to high school on her first day as an upperclassman.

"Instead, I buried her in that outfit."

Cook County State's Atty. Richard Devine attended part of the hearing Tuesday afternoon. Susan Clarke was a neighbor of Devine's on the North Side and a baby-sitter for his children in the months before her death.

Outside of court, he called the teen a bright girl who would have made her family proud.

"You can see even today, 20 years later, there is still a hole in their lives," Devine said.

Assistant State's Atty. Kevin Byrne had called Andrews "evil incarnate" as he argued for the death penalty. Most of those who came in contact with Andrews wound up scarred or killed, he said.

Byrne had accused Andrews of throwing himself on the mercy of the court in a bid to escape a death sentence.

Andrews' attorney, Assistant Public Defender Shelton Green, argued his client's poor health makes him a threat to no one.